We Are All Weird

by Seth Godin

Mass is what we call the undifferentiated, the easily reached majority that seeks to conform and survive.

NORMAL is what we call people in the middle. Normal describes and catalogs the defining characteristics of the masses. Normal is localized—being a vegetarian is weird in Kansas but normal in Mumbai. What’s normal here is not what’s normal there. Finding and amplifying normal is essential to anyone who traffics in mass. Over time, marketers have made normal a moral and cultural standard, not just a statistical one.

weird, people who have chosen to avoid conforming to the masses, at least in some parts of their lives.

RICH is my word for someone who can afford to make choices, who has enough resources to do more than merely survive. You don’t need a private plane to be rich, but you do need enough time and food and health and access to be able to interact with the market for stuff and for ideas.

The opportunity of our time is to support the weird, to sell to the weird and, if you wish, to become weird.

The epic battle of our generation is between the status quo of mass and the never-ceasing tide of weird.

Are you confident enough to encourage people to do what’s right and useful and joyful, as opposed to what the system has always told them they have to do? Should we make our own choices and let others make theirs?

The factory came first. It led to the mass market. Not the other way around.

Is it any wonder that market-leading organizations fear the weird?

The way of the world is now more information, more choice, more freedom, and more interaction. And yes, more weird.

Everything that’s not normal is weird, and right now, there’s more weirdness than ever.

The key element of being weird is this: you insist on making a choice.

Over and over, we see that when you give people a choice, they take it.

“Many enjoy the social dimensions of involvement, but what they really want is to have impact. Most have felt proud of a group they belong to in the past year and just under half say they accomplished something they couldn’t have accomplished on their own.”

As a result, the mass marketer keeps missing the point. He’s busy looking for giant clumps instead of organizing to service and work with smaller tribes.

Tower Records couldn’t satisfy our endless desire for variety and they disappeared.

If you want me to buy from you, perhaps you should acknowledge and then respect my weirdness.

organizations and producers are seriously threatened by choice, they fear weirdness, and they push us to fit in.

We don’t care so much about everyone; we care about us—where us is our people, our tribe, our interest group, our weirdness—not the anonymous masses.

If you persist in trying to be all things to all people, you will fail. The only alternative, then, is to be something important to a few people.

And to get there? To get there you must disappoint some slightly engaged normal folks, who, to tell the truth, can probably live just fine without you.

If you cater to the normal, you will disappoint the weird. And as the world gets weirder, that’s a dumb strategy.

Does the opportunity to grab the middle even exist for you any longer?

The key lesson: humanity and connection are trumping the desire for corporate scale.

The reality of digital community is that people are now available for close inspection, and the ’Net allows us to keep all of them in focus at once.

It doesn’t work because while they did the surface things, the easy things, the cheap things, they failed to do the hard work of being (and embracing) weird. It’s sort of weird for the masses, not the work of an actual human being with interests. There are no risks here.

those brave enough to seek weird will thrive.

weird begets weird.

One is for creators and the other is for those seeking safety (and nostalgia), at least in the moment.

When the standard at a school is defined as mediocre, why don’t we celebrate and leverage the student who’s willing to push the envelope and produce heroic work?

It’s human nature to be weird, but also human to be lonely. This conflict between fitting in and standing out is at the core of who we are.

If I can tell you that some other group is wrong—not just different, but wrong—then I increase my power over you.

Hence the stress that so many organized religions face today. When the religion ceases to be about faith and hope and connection and love and positive change and begins to focus on compliance, this organizational embrace of the status quo runs straight into the trend toward the weird. Playing the morality card is a weak way to build a tribe. Weird is not immoral.

And I care about freedom, the ability to express yourself until it impinges on someone else’s happiness.

Is this freedom?

The relentless search to recreate the mass of the past is at the heart of the stress we feel at work. It’s pushing governments, NGOs, entrepreneurs and most of all, big marketers, to go to extravagant lengths to push us to conform. A few outliers, though, have seen a different path. They’re catering to the weird instead. The challenge of your future is to do productive and useful work for and by and with the tribe that cares about you. To find and assemble the tribe, to earn their trust, to take them where they want and need to go.